2012 Honours Thesis - The Use of Social Media in Forensic Computing to Analyse Social Networks

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Papers from the Journal of Network Forensics

Today I've been reading some papers from the Journal of Network Forensics. These papers discuss the growth of social networking sites and how they can be used by both criminals and investigators. These have been particularly useful in identifying the basic information I can use in my project, and how a social network analysis tool for social media would be useful for investigators.

There are also some case studies included in both of the papers where information from social networking sites were used in criminal investigations. The papers themselves seem to suggest that this information was found through manual investigation of social networking sites, opposed to using a tool to assist in the information gathering. I will be looking further into these case studies, particularly those which relate directly to the person of interests social networks, to determine how the information from the social networking site(s) was obtained and used.

The references in both of the papers I've looked at also appear to be closely related to my study area, and I will look further into them as well as looking at other papers from the Journal of Network Forensics.

At this stage I feel that my project is running relatively smoothly and on time.